Ethical Marketing

What left me thinking from the movies night was more about the way marketing works. As a marketer, the marketing techniques showed in the Merchants of Cool video isn't anything new to me. I've seen it, I've heard about it, and often struggles with it.

They are based on marketing principles that strive to identify and satisfy people's needs by communicating those needs to the inside of a company and the benefits of the end product to the market outside. To put it simply, marketing is like an interpreter/agent between companies and their product/service consumers.

Sure, I do a lot of research to find out what people want in my industry, so we can improve our product offerings to suit user needs. But I thought...hang on...we do marketing on things that we humans create and they are not perfect, that's why marketing is important. But the good news of Jesus, isn't that a perfect truth? How else can we improve it?

Of course, we need to communicate that message to the world and that's where marketing comes in. The problem is, a lot of our churches today are applying worldly marketing practices rather than the principles. We package the church with bells and whistles to make it more attractive, sometimes to the extent that the reason for being there got lost or becomes second place.

What's more, to suit people's needs, the content is altered and changed to make it more appealing, and in the process the word of God is watered down without our knowing it. Suddenly, Christianity looks like just another consumable in the market. If it suits me, I'll take it, if it doesn't suit my needs, I'll shop somewhere or something else. No wonder someone describes going to church is like going to a theme park, to be entertained.

It's not hard to find mega churches using worldly marketing methods to appeal to the senses of their audience or Christians employing marketing tactics to milk the Christian community. Think multi-billion dollar Christian music industry. Think endless variations of a Christian book.

Worldly marketing is about doing anything to get attention - big, flashy, cool, outrageous, celebrity, wow factor... MTV has demonstrated how marketing is done solely to increase the company's bottom line regardless of whether the consumers have the need or will benefit from it. In doing what the world's doing, I can't help but wonder if our churches today are attracting consumers of religion or followers of Christ. How often do we talk about success in terms of spiritual growth rather than numbers?

I looked at the scriptures and it tells me that Jesus isn't handsome, but ordinary. So he wasn't cool in his time. I looked at the apostles, they didn't use healing or food to attract people to their midst, so they weren't being attractional. I looked at Paul or Peter, they were straight forward telling their people to repent. So they weren't packaging the gospel to be more palatable.

In an effort to make Christianity more relevant today, I think we are treading on dangerous ground. Marketing is a tool when used properly has great benefits. But as Christians, we need to be careful of the context that we are using it in and to use it based on Christian principles, not the world's.

I was even thinking about this very early in my career and wanting to do marketing from a Christian perspective. I was searching on the internet on ethical marketing about 10 years ago and found nothing. I just did a search again and was glad to see that it's now a topic worthy of discussion.

Well, I've more thoughts on this, but I'll leave it to another time.